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Ask HN: Are you colour blind? If so, how does this affect your work?

4 points by pachico ↗ HN
I am colour blind myself (Deuteranopia) and it mostly affect me when I have to digest charts and diagrams using colours I can't distinguish.

Also, I tend to see how people use emerald green and fire red to signal OK/KO which are two colours I really confuse. This is the case of all the alerts being fired, in general.

5 comments

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giantg2
I am not, but I've worked with people who have been. I try to use patterns instead if just colors. So stuff like a pie chart with one section solid, one with stripes, and another with dots, etc.

Took a little time to remember to do it each time and required some rework a couple times when I forgot. Nothing bug though.

mcrwfrd
I also experience Deuteranopia. I am usually only impacted if I'm trying to read a chart which requires that I map the colors in a legend to the colors on the lines/bars. This is usually impossible for me to do if there are >2 colors.

I use IntelliJ for my IDE, which has a color blind mode plugin. Before I discovered this, there were shades of orange and red that made some of the syntax highlighting useless.

My company uses Bitbucket, and the red/green colors they use for "lines added" and "lines removed" in code reviews are really hard to see. I usually have to use the side-by-side diff instead of the unified diff. Example here [1].

Otherwise, there's no real impact IMO. If I'm working on front-end stuff, I just use the hex codes that the designers tell me to use. If I'm working with a designer that is particularly interested in accessibility, they'll often ask me "hey can you see the colors on this layout?".

[1] https://bitbucket.org/product/features/code-review

ksaj
I am tritanopic (yellow/blue blind) in one eye. It doesn't affect me a lot since I can resolve colours more correctly in the other, and unless something is partially obscuring my vision, I rarely notice.

However, when lights are dim or something is obscuring my more properly-sighted eye, I do have a harder time distinguishing blue from black and purple from brown, and a few other colour confusions (yellow/white, green/teal, etc). Still doesn't really affect me in any notable way, other than people around me getting a laugh out of my inability to name all colours the way they see them.

nicbou
It rarely affects me seriously. Sometimes the colour choices make them hard to distinguish: a red/green status light, a colour-coded chart etc.

It gets really hard when I must choose colours. I can't mimic colours I see, or pick a good colour palette.

epwr
I super relate to your second line here. Sometimes I have to pick colours for websites I work on, so I'll either find someone to help pick or the website will be white, black, and maybe one accent colour.